Mortgage Credit Too Tight: Bernanke

Written by: Shanthi Bharatwaj11/15/12 - 2:40 PM EST

NEW YORK ( TheStreet) -- The housing market is "far from being out of the woods," Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Thursday.

In a speech at the Operation HOPE Global Financial Dignity Summit in Atlanta, the Chairman said that while the recovery in housing was encouraging, the revival had been uneven and still faced challenges.

Home prices have risen for nine consecutive months, residential investment is up 15%, homebuilder sentiment is stronger and housing demand is picking up as a result of historically low mortgage rates.

But Bernanke also noted that 20% of mortgage borrowers still remained underwater, delinquency rates still hovered above 7% and the national homeownership rate is now at a 15-year low. "So, although there are good reasons to be encouraged by the recent direction of the housing market, we should not be satisfied with the progress we have seen so far," the Chairman said.

While the continuing weakness in the economy was factor behind the low demand for mortgages, credit also remained too tight.

The share of home-purchase borrowers with credit scores below 620 has fallen from about 17 percent of borrowers at the end of 2006 to about 5 percent more recently.

"Certainly, some tightening of credit standards was an appropriate response to the lax lending conditions that prevailed in the years leading up to the peak in house prices. Mortgage loans that were poorly underwritten or inappropriate for the borrower's circumstances ultimately had devastating consequences for many families and communities, as well as for the financial institutions themselves and the broader economy," Bernanke said. "However, it seems likely at this point that the pendulum has swung too far the other way, and that overly tight lending standards may now be preventing creditworthy borrowers from buying homes, thereby slowing the revival in housing and impeding the economic recovery."

Importantly, "restrictive mortgage lending conditions do not seem to be linked to any insufficiency of bank capital or to a general unwillingness to lend," he said.

The Chairman said policymakers had taken steps to ease mortgage credit. The Federal Housing Finance Agency, the regulator of the GSEs, recently announced new rules that will provide mortgage lenders greater clarity about the conditions under which they will be required to buy back defaulted mortgages from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or otherwise address origination problems.